


Hush

by De Orakle (Delphi)



Series: Kinds of Magic [1]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Backstory, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self-Harm, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-07-09
Updated: 2000-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:08:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/De%20Orakle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Severus Snape attempts to escape from Lord Voldemort's service.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hush

The hustle and bustle of a Cardiff street at day's end. The light and temperature are falling. In darkening doorways, the shadows of shopkeepers shiver and fumble with their keys. Above them, storm clouds that have all day been swelling to an ugly bruised black burst. Pellets of icy rain pelt the sidewalks.

The pedestrian traffic pull up their collars and hunch their shoulders against the sudden gale. Eyes squinting against the wind, they huddle closer together and pick up the pace.

Not one of them takes notice of the young man huddled in the mouth of an alley between a hamburger bar and a video rental store—and little wonder. He's wrapped up in shadows and something ragged and black, and the good people are wrapped up in their own business. It's cold, and they have warm homes to get to. They hustle and they bustle right past him as if he were invisible. It's not even magic.

If even one set of eyes would look past the shadow to the substance, what would they see? A runaway, most likely—hunched over and bundled up, he's that hard combination of young and dirty and hidden. Or perhaps a junkie. One in need of a fix, judging by how pale he is. How twitchy. How he mutters, singing to himself—strange words to familiar tunes.

No matter. Nobody looks. The young man hasn't been under a shower spray in far too long, and with this grease and dirt, eyes slide right over him.

And yet...and yet, a few ears do catch a snatch of broken melody, filtering it through their childhoods and into their throats. A few catch themselves humming as they hurry past the sort of person who hangs about dark alleyways.

"...papa's gonna buy you...a brand new wand..."

He's been singing for hours now, broken-voiced. A myriad of nursery school songs and one whispered lie have kept him too busy to scream. "James" was the lie, in response to the old woman who smelled of cats and cabbage, the one who slipped him a Muggle tuppence and asked what his name might be, dearie. He repeats their conversation over again in his head.

"James, James, James. My name is James."

He wonders—as his parched throat croons lullabies and his hand does its dirty work—whether he was thinking of Potter when he said it. In a way that he can't quite grasp, he knows these things to be important, the remembrance and the singing.

Yes, perhaps he'd been thinking of Potter, perhaps...or maybe "James" is merely a name while "Severus" is a puzzled frown, even in the wizarding world. Or perhaps especially in the wizarding world, which Severus has come to believe is ruled as much by irony as it is by magic. Potter...he must have been thinking of Potter. After all, Severus knows he's never been able to think very quickly on his feet, and—what may have been a laugh hacks into his song—he can't even _feel_ his feet anymore.

"And the...little wizard climbed...climbed the hill..."

There's a look of something like awe on Severus's face. He's amazed there's this much blood in him. It's slick in the dark, like a black slug slithering out from under his skin. It smells of rot, and that doesn't surprise him.

His wand is cool in his sweaty palm, bubbling with magic _in potentia_ , a chill that's always rather reminded him of soft drinks. It's not sharp, his wand: a sturdy 11-inch elm and unicorn hair, but it doesn't take an edge to draw blood. All it really takes is a steady scrape-scrape-scrape of wood over the forearm until the skin blushes pink, then angry red, and layer by layer he's turned inside out.

An awful lot of blood. And meat as well.

He licks his lips. That's something he used to think about all of the time back when he was fourteen and lying alone in bed at night. He'd think of sex too, of course—what boy doesn't?—but most often it was meat that captured his midnight thoughts. Staring up at the darker-than-black canopy of his bed, his hands running over his chest, he would get hard just imagining the puzzle of flesh that lay under his skin. He would picture the red and white of it, and a small step from there had him imagining the bloody flesh of other boys, undressing them of their skin with his eyes.

But there is no eroticism in the syrup before him now, a mess of something ridged and bumpy and twitching. It's ugly, and it hurts, a gnawing, hungry hurt along the torn edges of skin.

"lost his head-head-head...turning gold-gold-gold back into lead-lead-lead..."

He imagines he can hear the girls' voices and the clack-clack-clack of double-dutch ropes. If his head isn't set to dredging up schoolyard memories, he'll realise that his hand is scraping off the only protection for parts of him never meant to meet the outside, that his nerves are screaming in bleeding little voices.

Even as the icy rain soaks through his robes—what happened to his cloak, and are they tracking him by it right now, he wonders—his skin breaks out in a new sweat. He feels ill, so very hot, and if he weren't so feverish he might realise that he's ill. From the shock. From the cold. From the sheer desperation that drove him to walk on blindly for a night and a day before he stopped in this alley in a nameless Muggle neighbourhood and found that he couldn't get moving again.

It's dark now, and everything is grey save his blood, which still trickles and smears in glossy black and something else...something faintly green. Green like Lily Evans' eyes, green like swamp gas against the monochrome of his trembling arm.

A keening wail swells like an uncoiling serpent in his chest, slithering up his throat, and he fights it, choking it off into a whimper before he's tempted to curl up tight and mewl like an infant. Through the stink of spilt blood and rubbish bins, his memory mocks him with the heavy scent of roses and posh perfume. He remembers the crook of his mother's neck, and how burying his face in the softness of it soothed away any hurt.

"In the _dark_ , in the _dark_ , in the...dark..."

He forces himself back to the songs and even back to the pain, because he knows if They realise he's missing, thoughts of his family will paint a neon target on his back. And he knows what They will do to him if they even suspect he tried to run; the bloody image flickers so quickly in his mind's eye that he doesn't even know he's thought it. Only an ache at the base of his spine lingers, seemingly detached from his thoughts.

"...with the spark, with the spark..."

What was that song, to the tune of some hymn, with the clapping...? He sets to humming it, though the notes snag on the broken glass in his throat. He stares down at his wand, trying to deconstruct the mess he's made into nothing but wet and raw and red. He tries, but the hungry mouth of a wound comes back into focus, and one empty skull's eye stares up at him, wide and accusing. If he had anything left inside of him, Severus would weep.

Slyly, slyly, the ragged remains of the tattoo asks why its sacred face has been desecrated to such gore. It asks the way the Dark Lord would, softly at first: "Severus...Severus, my Death Eater, tell me what you've done." Such a gentle, coaxing voice, like a loving father who knows best. And though Severus has felt all too well the curses that lie behind those words, he knows he'd answer all the same.

Perhaps if exhaustion hadn't so tight a grip on him, there might be room for the mounting panic to grab hold. 'Oh God,' he thinks, though not in such words, 'what the hell was I thinking, trying to escape?' There is, he believes to the core of him, no escape from the dark mark, no escape from he whom Severus cannot not bring himself to name. No escape save death, and any irony to be found there is lost to Severus's seething and childish frustration.

A sudden fury rises up inside him. Something snaps inside his head. His hand clenches once, twice, and then he descends on his mark of Cain with renewed fervour, tearing, hacking with his wand and oh yes, how it hurts him, and how he deserves it. He _hates_. He hates the ones who took his mother away from him, he hates the ones who promised him revenge, and most of all he hates himself for believing them.

His jaw clenches, and still he forces out mangled expletives. Still the empty eye socket stares up at him, and how easy it could be, he thinks, to give in and fall head over heels into its cavernous stare.

Over the torn...bleeding...

Distorted, like a television glimpsed from the street through a Muggle's living room window, the skull grins up at him, taunting him in Parseltongue. Its outline glows red, and Severus realises with a sick, certain knowledge that it goes all the way down to his marrow. His lip curls into a feral sneer, and the rage that seizes him is sweet and terrible and a familiar companion.

Blood: runny and rancid in his mouth as his teeth close together in painful satisfaction. It dribbles down his throat, daring him to gag. Clever boy that Severus is, it's not until he spits out something soft that he realises this wasn't the brightest of ideas.

It hurts.

Beyond all holy belief, it _hurts_. And before his head thumps dully against the pavement, before his stomach lurches upward towards his mouth, his last thought is startling clear and wonderfully scandalised: 'That was a _vein_.'

The pavement is wet and dirty and blessedly cool against his burning cheek. His mouth opens, and if he were closer to consciousness, he might choke on the acrid bile that lurches up from his throat to burn his tongue and drip foully to the ground. Through the mists of what seems an eternity ago, he recalls the taste of an Alarum potion that he made for his fifth year finals. Two ounces of powdered Minotaur horn...and one pint Basilisk blood...and something that smelled like cherries...

Stars burst before Severus's eyes. They're silver and blue, and not red at all against the shadowed brick wall. There's quite a lot of blood on his hands and in his mouth. He's going to bleed to death, he realises. It's a calm, almost pleasant thought now that his anger has left him. It's a certainty, resigned to it as he is, and there's comfort in that.

He's very tired. His eyelids fall closed with the scrape and weight of stone tablets. He tucks his right arm around himself, pressing his hand tight to his spasming stomach; he lies with his bloodied left flung outwards. He doesn't want that thing touching him.

He shivers one last convulsive shiver as his stomach contracts against the back of his ribs. Snow, real snow, falls now. It leaves a lacey latticework pattern over his dingy black robes, over pale skin, over the gaping wound from under which the surviving edge of a tattoo gazes upward impotently. His wand lies by his side, likewise powerless.

Papa's gonna buy him a brand new wand...

That swaddling-cloth rag of a lullaby is a maddening succour as Severus slips into what he prays to be his last sleep. He feels very small and heavy and hidden. He hopes that no one finds his body.

* * *

By half-past nine, the crowds have hustled and bustled their way right off of the streets. A few stragglers remain—people who were never quite part of the mob, even while standing in the thick of it. The invisible ones, like our young man in the alley. One of their sort walks quickly up the sidewalk now, leaving determined footprints in the snow-coated slush. He doesn't turn his face from the wind. He's wrapped up in what might be a trench coat but is more likely a wine-coloured cloak patterned in yellow stars. His hair is long and silver, and if those few who know him well could see the grim set of his mouth, they would know that he is very, very frightened.

He stops still in his tracks in front of a druggist's whose neon light has gone out for the night. He tilts his head to the side, listening intently for something, and then he's off again, striding faster and faster and faster and he...stops.

It might be days before anyone from the neighbourhood would find Severus there in the alley. He's the colour of rubbish bins and shadows, and it's cold enough that the smell won't be enough to trouble anyone. But to the one who stands now on the sidewalk, looking into a labyrinth trap of back alleys, the brick and refuse fall by the wayside and all he sees is a deathly still figure.

The boy. He can't help but think of Severus as a boy (a quiet boy, a haunted boy, a pretty boy in his own severe way) and to see him now in these unfathomable depths of a man's trouble is as much a shock to Albus as the overpowering stench of blood and vomit.

And all of the betrayal, the confusion and the anger that Albus felt when he set to tracking his missing alumnus, withers and floats away on the wind. All that remains is a very still sorrow and a bright flare of panic.

"Oh, Severus."

He takes the (quiet, haunted) boy in his arms most carefully, for a human body shouldn't be this still, this fragile. Though Albus Dumbledore has seen far too much in his lifetime to have faith in anything but the universe in its simplest terms, he silently mouths a long-buried childhood prayer. His lips lightly brush the tangled and greasy black hair as he Apparates. He tells himself it wasn't intentional, just the way Severus is positioned across his lap. He tells himself the boy will be fine.

They vanish in the instant in which any watcher might have blinked. Only footprints remain, and the blood, and even those will be covered soon enough. The snow continues to fall, eager to do away with any trace of these outsiders.

* * *

The room into which the two Apparate is very warm and very secret. Severus has been here twice before and yes, even now he stirs in his death-like sleep as if in recognition.

To one who knows only of the daybreak shadow that precedes Albus Dumbledore, the room would come as quite a surprise in its quaintness. It's simple and sturdy and warm with the smell of cedar and butterscotch. The bed, a triple-mattressed monstrosity, dominates the room, and Severus is laid down gently beside a towering pile of patchwork quilts and wool blankets. Blood has already begun to soak into the set of cheerful yellow sheets. So much blood.

Albus shakes his head. Some simple healing of the flesh begins.

A fact to which only healers seem privy: the spells to heal take a greater toll from the caster than any other sort, and there is a Faustian trick to it as well. Although it is nothing short of miraculous, the way that Severus's arm has begun to crochet itself together layer by layer from the inside out, it's nothing but a cheat of time. That cut of flesh will be useless in the last months of Severus's life, if he lives to his old age (and how unlikely that seems now, as the new pink skin forms around the shape of skull and serpent).

Albus refuses to avert his eyes from the grinning skull, but he nonetheless finds a long white handkerchief to wrap around it after it's been cleaned. It will do the boy no good to look upon the mark when he wakes.

He presses his lips to the boy's forehead, testing for fever. Severus shivers, shudders, shakes.

"Severus?" What dark times lie ahead, when this boy trembles so in Albus's own sanctuary?

He unfastens the black robes that are greasy from wear and limp from sweat and snow. The body underneath is much too thin, and Albus doesn't know whether he means to laugh or weep at the Wailing Banshees t-shirt with its lurid graphic. Just a boy. Just an angry, naive boy.

Of a sudden, Albus feels very old, very tired. He's tempted to lie down beside Severus, bury his face in the pillows and forget until morning. But he looks at Severus's mouth, crusted with blood, and quietly sighs.

He draws a bowlful of warm water and finds an old flannel, and he does all that's left for him to do.

The water is soon swirling with black and rusty red. It's an easy motion to fall into: dip the cloth, wipe gently at Severus's skin, dip the cloth again. The boy's face is motionless in sleep, though anything but peaceful. It's the lack of expression that Albus finds so disconcerting; the eyes are unmoving under their lowered lids. It's almost a relief when Severus shivers, to see some sign of life in that still body.

He trails his fingers along the boy's arm. He bites his lip, awash with deja vu as he unfastens his own robes and lays them atop his patient. Severus still appears to be that skinny first year whom Albus found one night outside of the Slytherins' locked dormitory in frustrated tears, attempting to summon his robe with neither wand nor stitch of clothing. Albus has to wonder, had he done more for Severus in his first year, in his third, in his fifth, would the boy be in this mess now? Severus always made it too easy to push him away, but what damage he hid...

He strokes the boy's short hair, feeling the grease against his fingertips. Severus, in sleep, leans ever so slightly into the caress, and his skin feels very soft to the touch, if much too chilled. Severus stirs, whimpers, and curls inward, gripping the body-warmed robes around him like a blanket.

Albus rests his hand atop Severus's head, feeling the dark thoughts that scurry about inside like rats. Severus will be soon to wake, Albus suspects, and he winces slightly as the boy whimpers again in his shallow grave of sleep. He remembers other children, other nightmares, so long ago.

He smiles rather sadly and begins to hum a lullaby, the first one to come to mind. Music—a magic far more primal and far more powerful than that which he has spent his life studying and that which Severus seems so willing to die for. He pulls a flowered quilt over the boy when Severus's thin frame is wracked with another onslaught of shivers, and quietly, Albus begins to sing aloud.

"Hush little wizard, dusk and dawn, papa's gonna buy you a brand new wand..."


End file.
